In order to improve the quality of systematic researches, various tools have been developed by well-known scientific institutes sporadically. Dr. Nader Ale Ebrahim has collected these sporadic tools under one roof in a collection named “Research Tool Box”. The toolbox contains over 720 tools so far, classified in 4 main categories: Literature-review, Writing a paper, Targeting suitable journals, as well as Enhancing visibility and impact factor.

Monday, 22 August 2016

Digital Object Identifier System and DOI Names (DOIs) Guide

Who should read this?

This
guide is intended for researchers and eResearch infrastructure support
providers. It explains the Digital Object Identifier system and the
advantages of using a DOI Name to cite and link to research data. This
guide should be read in conjunction with the ANDS Guides on Persistent identifiers and Data citation.

What is the DOI System?

The
Digital Object Identifier system is used for identifying intellectual
property in the digital environment. It is used principally by
publishers, and is an implementation of the Handle System for persistent
identifiers. The International DOI Federation (IDF) appoints
Registration Agencies who allocate DOI prefixes, register DOI Names, and
provide the necessary infrastructure to allow registrants to declare
and maintain metadata.

scientific
data sets, through DataCite, a consortium of leading research
libraries, technical information providers, and scientific data centres;
and

European Union official publications, through the EU publications office.

To
promote the citation and reuse of Australian research data, ANDS
provides a DOI Service for research datasets as a free service to
Australian institutions.

DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers)

A
DOI Name (DOI) is a specific type of Handle and can be assigned to any
object that is a form of intellectual property. DOI should be
interpreted as 'digital identifier of an object' rather than 'identifier
of a digital object'.

A
DOI consists of a unique, case-insensitive, alphanumeric character
sequence that is divided into two parts, a prefix and a suffix,
separated by a forward slash. The prefix is assigned by a DOI
Registration Agency and always starts with '10.' This distinguishes it
as a DOI as opposed to other types of Handle. The suffix is assigned by
the publication agent, the agency supplying the information about the
object, and must be unique within a prefix.

Example of a DOI within a data citation:

Hanigan,
Ivan (2012): Monthly drought data for Australia 1890-2008 using the
Hutchinson Drought Index. The Australian National University Australian
Data Archive. DOI :10.4225/13/50BBFD7E6727A http://dx.doi.org/10.4225/13/50BBFD7E6727A

This
is a complete DOI Name. The prefix 10.4225 consists of the directory
code '10' (always 10 for a DOI Name) and the registrant's code '4225'
which is allocated by the German National Library of Science and
Technology for scientific datasets in its role as a registration agency.

What is the difference between a DOI and other Persistent Identifiers?

A
DOI is a Persistent Identifier (PID), but also provides extra benefits.
A DOI can be used to uniquely identify either digital or non-digital
objects, whether or not they have any internet presence.

A
DOI persistently identifies an object itself through listing it in a
DOI Registry, while a PID persistently identifies only an object's
location. DOIs are supported by the International DOI Federation (IDF)
and Registration Agencies infrastructure, which provides ongoing DOI
services and allows for a high level of confidence in the quality and
accuracy of DOIs.

An
object may have multiple DOIs and multiple PIDs assigned to it as it
moves through the publishing process. If an object has an internet
location, it will have either a URL or other persistent identifier (such
as Handle, PURL or ARK) in addition to a DOI. Each DOI and PID will
confer a different benefit on the dataset.

What are the advantages of DOIs for datasets?

The
assignment of DOIs through the international DOI infrastructure has
associated costs. Accordingly, DOIs are unlikely to be issued on an ad
hoc or unmanaged basis, but will be assigned by authorised agencies or
institutions to datasets that are well described and managed archivally
for long-term access.

The
assignment of a DOI therefore indicates that a dataset will be well
managed and accessible for long-term use. It also brands published data
as a first-class research output in the publishing world, since datasets
will be assigned DOIs regularly as is done for existing scholarly
publications.

Using
DOIs in this way will establish easier access to research data on the
Internet, increase the acceptance of research data as legitimately
citable contribution to the scientific record, and support data
archiving that will permit results to be verified and re-purposed for
future study.

What is ANDS doing?

ANDS
is a member of the DataCite consortium, a group of leading research
libraries and technical information providers that aims to make it
easier for research datasets to be handled as independent, citable,
unique scientific objects. ANDS runs a DOI Local Handle Server, minting
and managing DOIs on behalf of DataCite.

ANDS
has its own DOI prefix and research institutions, consortia and
agencies are able to obtain DOIs for scholarly outputs such as:

datasets and collections

associated workflows

software

models

grey literature

The
ANDS Cite My Data DOI minting service is available as a machine to
machine or manual service. It is free to use for publicly funded
Australian research organisations and government agencies.

ANDS
is also been working with Thomson Reuters and data providers to track
and record dataset use through DOIs, and making that information
available through the Data Citation Index.

research information managementcurrent research information systemsresearch impactresearch qualityWageningen University and Research Center (WUR)

Issue Date:

9-Jun-2016

Publisher:

euroCRIS

Source:

"Communicating
and Measuring Research Responsibly: Profiling, Metrics, Impact,
Interoperability": Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on
Current Research Information Systems (2016) Procedia Computer Science
(2016, In Press)

Series/Report no.:

CRIS2016: 13th International Conference on Current Research Information Systems (St Andrews, June 9-11, 2016)

Conference:

CRIS2016 – St Andrews

Abstract:

Wageningen
University and Research Center (WUR) is one of the most prestigious
research institutions in the world in life sciences and improved
significantly in several rankings over the last years. One of the
`drivers` of this success story is a comprehensive quality management
exercise based on Research information from an integrated CRIS system,
that managed to influence researchers publishing behaviour towards more
quality, impact and visibility.

Description:

Delivered
at the CRIS2016 Conference in St Andrews; published in Procedia
Computer Science xx (Jul 2016).-- Contains conference paper (8 pages)
and presentation (18 slides).Note from the authors.-- "The results
presented in this paper build on the work of Wouter Gerritsma, a former
employee of Wageningen UR, who passed away on the 21st of June 2016.
Wouter made a great contribution to the field of research performance in
Wageningen and beyond".

Guest post by Daniel Price. Daniel lives
in Israel, has an MA in Library and Information Science from Bar Ilan
University, and works as a librarian at Shalem College in Jerusalem.

There is a clear desirability to publish a paper that has a strong
scholarly impact, both for personal satisfaction knowing that one’s
research has been viewed and built upon, and for professional reasons,
since the number of citations a paper can correlate to promotion and
tenure - the ubiquitous “publish or perish” (Miller, Taylor and Bedeian,
2011), which has now become an international phenomena (De Meis,
Leopoldo, et al, 2003; De Rond and Miller, 2005; Min, Abdullah and
Mohamed, 2013; Osuna, Cruz-Castro and Sanz-Menéndez, 2010; Qiu, 2010;
Rotich and Muskali, 2013), increased salary and external funding
(Browman and Stergiou, 2008; Diamond, 1986; Gomez-Mejia and Balkin,
1992; Monastersky, 2005; Schoonbaert and Roelants, 1996) and even the
chance of winning professional prizes such as a Nobel Prize (Pendlebury,
2013).

Understandably then many studies have been carried out to discover the
characteristics of highly cited papers (Aksnes, 2003) and the factors
that influence citation counts. It is widely accepted that it is not
just the quality of the science that affect the citation rate, but
bibliometric parameters of papers such as its length (Abt, 1998; Ball,
2008; Falagas et. al. 2013; Hamrick, Fricker and Brown, 2010), number of
references (Corbyn, 2010; Kostoff, 2007; Vieira and Gomes, 2010;
Webster et. al., 2009), number of authors (Aksnes, 2003; Borsuk et. al.,
2009; Gazni and Didegah, 2011; Wuchty et al., 2007), length of titles
(Habibzadeh and Yadollahie, 2010; Jacques and Sebire, 2010), colons in
titles (Jamali and Nikzad, 2011; van Wesel, Wyatt & ten Haa, 2014;
Rostami, Mohammadpoorasl, and Hajizadeh, 2014).

A variety of external considerations is also known to influence the
citation rate of academic papers. Intuitively a paper that has been
publicised in the popular print media will be cited more as its
publicity makes researchers more aware of it; however it can be argued
that quality newspapers only cite valuable articles that would garner a
significant number of citations in any case. That the first assumption
was true was proven thirteen years ago in 1991 by comparing how many
more citations articles published in the New England Journal of Medicine
received if they were quoted in the New York Times during a 12 week
period in 1978 when copies of the paper were printed but not distributed
due to a strike compared to the following year of 1979. The results
showed that articles covered by the Times received 72.8% more citations
during the first year after their publication but only those discussed
when the paper was actually distributed. Articles covered by the Times
during the strike period received no more citations that articles not
referenced by the Times, thus proving that exposure in the Times is a
cause of citation (“the publicity hypothesis”) and not a forecast of
future trends (the “earmark hypothesis”) (Phillips, 1991).

Phillips’ findings articles that covered in the New York Times receive
more citations was confirmed in another study conducted 11 years later
which also found however that exposure in less “elite” daily newspapers
(but not in evening broadcasts of mainstream USA television networks)
during a twelve month period from mid-1997 to mid-1998 also correlated
with higher citation rates of a wider range of scientific papers, thus
showing that scientific communication is not just carried out through
elite channels. Importantly though, the author notes that his study does
not prove the “publicity hypothesis” as the articles that were
publicised could have been more intrinsically important and were only
cited for this reason, although it does cast doubt on the “earmark
hypothesis” since many articles that were not mentioned were cited
(Kiernan, 2003).

In the present day much scholarly communication takes place on Web 2.0
tools and in the emerging field of “altmetrics” (Konkiel, 2013; Priem,
2014; Thelwall, 2013), studies focus on parametrics including whether it
has been cited and discussed on academic blogs (Shema, Bar-Ilan and
Thelwall 2014), tweeted (Eysenbach, 2011), and uploaded to a social
media platform such as Mendley (Li and Thelwall, 2012).

Research has also investigated whether articles cited on the decidedly
non-elitist Wikipedia. A study conducted in the beginning of 2010 found
that 0.54% of approximately nineteen million Wikipedia pages cited a
PubMed journal article, which corresponds to about 0.08% of all Pubmed
articles. The researchers showed that journal articles that were cited
in Wikipedia were cited more and had higher F1000 scores than a random
subset of non-cited articles, a phenomenon they explained according to
their hypothesised that Wikipedia users would only cite important
articles that present novel and ground-breaking research (Evans and
Krauthammer, 2011).

A larger study carried out two and half years later came to the same
conclusion that academic papers in the field of computer science which
are cited on Wikipedia would be more likely to be cited because the
Wikipedia entries are written by talented authors who are careful to
cite reputable authors and trending research topics (Shuai, Jiang, Liu
and Bollen, 2013).

These conclusions support the “earmark hypothesis” that Phillips
rejected and Kiernan doubted. Wikipedians are credited with identifying
high impact journal articles soon after they are published and
recommending them to other users.

In order to preserve a careful dialectic of both sides of the
publicity/earmark hypotheses though, the possibility should be
entertained that the large number of Wikipedia users may include
researchers who, flooded with an information overload of thousands of
articles, are motivated to read and quote certain articles because they
saw them quoted on Wikipedia. Future research could investigate the
information behavior of a large number of researchers, specifically
their use of Wikipedia.

Browman, H. I., & Stergiou, K. I. (2008). Factors and indices are
one thing, deciding who is scholarly, why they are scholarly, and the
relative value of their scholarship is something else entirely. Ethics
in Science and Environmental Politics, 8(1), 1-3.

Corbyn, Z. (2010). An easy way to boost a paper's citations. Nature. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/news.2010.406

Eysenbach, G. (2011). Can tweets predict citations? Metrics of social
impact based on twitter and correlation with traditional metrics of
scientific impact. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 13(4).

Price, D. (2014). A bibliographic study of articles published in twelve
humanities journals. Available at
https://www.academia.edu/7820799/A_Bibliographic_Study_of_Articles_Published_in_Twelve_Humanities_Journals

Shema, H., Bar‐Ilan, J., & Thelwall, M. (2014). Do blog citations
correlate with a higher number of future citations? Research blogs as a
potential source for alternative metrics. Journal of the Association for
Information Science and Technology.

Yes,
it's absolutely worth the effort. Conducting the research into topics
you don't already know about can be fascinating; verifying and
challenging the things you do know can be both surprising and rewarding.
Shaping that information into well-worded prose is satisfying and then
seeing your contribution immediately published on one of the world's
biggest and most popular websites is very exciting. Inviting others to
then peer review your work and receiving feedback on it can be very
satisfying, as can working together with other contributors to improve
their own work. Knowing that your contribution may help others to
increase their own knowledge about the subject you've written about -
whether that's for work, just out of interest, or whatever other reason -
is very satisfying.

Contributing to Wikipedia -
at least, contributing something meaningful - is not effortless. But if
your attitude is that anything that takes a bit of effort isn't worth
doing, I'm afraid you're not going to go far in life. Is it worth the
effort? Yes, definitely. Come and join in.

Guidelines for Participating in Wikipedia from NIH

Wikipedia
is an encyclopedia and is the fifth most popular property on the web.
At present [February 3, 2015] there are more than 75,000 active
contributors across the globe with hundreds of thousands of volunteers
at computers working on more than 13,000,000 articles in more than 260
languages. Recently, the system has become much more sophisticated and
"vandals" are handled quickly. But the majority of science articles and
good health information are rated by Wikipedia as "incomplete." There is
a real opportunity to strengthen this public resource. A biochemistry
professor who was part of the NIH Wikipedia Academy workshop in July
2009, noted about the content: "[it is] meant to derive its authority
from journal references, scientific literature…." We hope these
guidelines will help you to become part of a unique opportunity in
keeping with the NIH’s history of making credible, vetted, authoritative
information available to the public. The time spent can be minimal, but
the impact could be great. Information you have already developed that
might benefit scientists or the public worldwide could be put up in a
few minutes — or one item in a journal club could be an entry (suggested
by some NIH scientists) as a shared experience, or if one has
permission and is so inclined, an authored article in an area needing
new information would require more effort. Many have heard that schools
will not permit citation of Wikipedia — completely appropriate—and
acknowledged by Wikipedia. They, as with any encyclopedia, would not be a
credible citation, however, the growing list of peer-reviewed,
published sources used in citation makes it an invaluable tool for
getting started or locating original sources.

NIH scientists and health and science writers can
contribute to Wikipedia within their own fields. Contributions may be
in the form of a range of activities from authoring articles in areas of
individual or laboratory expertise, editing for accuracy or improving
current entries, or providing—and this is an important contribution —
citations.

Remember that Wikipedia makes every effort to be a neutral resource
and fact-based. The community is particularly sensitive to self
aggrandizing, hype, or policy items. The main page for NIH programs (IC
or Office) should go through the appropriate communication officer in
your IC or Office.

Time spent on Wikipedia entries must be approved by the immediate
supervisor and the time permitted for this outreach activity
predetermined before the work is begun. It is recommended that the staff
person indicates the areas he/she will contribute to in the time
allotted.

In your NIH capacity: NIH staff scientists and science writers and
health professionals may only contribute to Wikipedia entries in their
own scientific and health areas of expertise from the NIH.

In your personal capacity: To contribute to articles in additional
areas of interest, NIH employees should use personal resources,
including non-Government home computers and personal internet accounts.

NIH staff may only share information that is in the public domain
and contribute factual information not opinion. Nor should staff enter
into discussions of policy. That is not appropriate to Wikipedia nor NIH
guidelines.

To ensure quality and avoid instances of plagiarism, Wikipedia
requires contributors to cite literature or link to existing materials
and to provide proper attribution to authors and sources, even if the
work is in the public domain. There is constant vigilance by Wikipedians
in favor of fact over opinion; inaccurate information is corrected
through a series of permissions.

The Wikimedia Foundation has established a switchboard, staffed by
volunteers, for NIH editors and contributors. Contributors should use
the NIH Switchboard for Wikipedia to ensure that your contributions are
welcomed. We will be posting information about contacting the
switchboard on line.

Just
a few years ago Wikipedia was seen as a barbarian invading the ivory
tower. Now, an increasing number of academics recognize that it can be
used as an effective teaching tool.

The following paper is divided into two parts. It beings with a
discussion of the advantages of using Wikipedia as a teaching tool, an
activity that goes beyond a simple addition to the teaching repertoire,
and allows contributing to our society through service learning and
participation in an online community of practice. Contributing to
Wikipedia benefits students, instructors and the wider community.

The second part focuses on practice of teaching with Wikipedia.
Building on my five years of experience in teaching with wikis and
Wikipedia and holding workshops on the subject, I discuss the most
efficient ways to incorporate Wikipedia into the curriculum, highlight
common problems and their solutions, and describe a number of new tools
enhancing the “teaching with Wikipedia” experience.

The following paper is divided into two parts. It beings with a
discussion of the advantages of using Wikipedia as a teaching tool, an
activity that goes beyond a simple addition to the teaching repertoire,
and allows contributing to society through service learning and
participation in an online community of practice. The second part that
follows gets into the gritty details of how one can actually do so.
Building on my five years of experience in teaching with wikis and
Wikipedia and holding workshops on the subject, I discuss the most
efficient ways to incorporate Wikipedia into the curriculum, highlight
common problems and their solutions, and describe the plethora of new
tools enhancing the “teaching with Wikipedia” experience.

Background

Wikipedia is a non–profit, open content encyclopedia, edited
collaboratively by volunteers. It employes wiki technology, which allows
anyone to edit Web pages directly through a browser without the need to
install any additional software. It is also an increasingly popular
platform for educators, who assign their students to contribute to
various areas of a given project.

In 2007 when I published my first paper on teaching with wikis and
Wikipedia (Konieczny, 2007), I was just beginning my research into the
subject, inspired by my first teaching experiences. Back then, among
scholars and educators, Wikipedia was still a stranger, an enemy even,
intruding into the ivory tower, and news stories were rife with reports
of it being banned from schools and campuses (Jaschik, 2007). Several
years down the road, the tide has changed; instead of stories about
students told not to use Wikipedia, we see reports on how professors are
using it as a teaching tool (Pollard, 2008; Wilson, 2008; Cummings and
Barton, 2008; Cummings, 2009a; Chapman, 2010; Wright, 2012). A number of
professional publications, from journals to entire books, have
transformed the idea of Wikipedia as a teaching tool from a preposterous
idea to a respected innovation (Callis, et al., 2009;
Cummings, 2009b; Corbyn, 2011; Burnsed, 2011; Reilly, 2011). It is not
uncommon to see panels, workshops, and even entire tracks dedicated to
the educational use of wikis in general and Wikipedia in particular;
they can be found not only at conferences such as Wikimania and WikiSym,
but also at the major, long estabilished scholarly events (Konieczny,
2011). Most visibly, since late 2010, professional academic
organizations have actively begun promoting the teaching with Wikipedia
approach, beginning with the American Psychological Society and American
Sociological Association (Banaji, 2010; Wright, 2011, 2012).

Wikipedia is steadily ranked among the Internet’s most popular Web
sites. There is a growing recognition that students are and will be
using Wikipedia to acquire knowledge (Head and Eisenberg, 2010; Fiore,
2011; Menchen–Trevino and Hargittai, 2011; Knight and Pryke, 2012), that
barring them from doing so is impossible to enforce and is in fact even
counter productive (Lim, 2009; Knight and Pryke, 2012), and that
Wikipedia itself is no less reliable and credible than other
encyclopedias (Giles, 2005; Chesney, 2006; Menchen–Trevino and
Hargittai, 2011).

However, while a small proportion of students have an in–depth
knowledge of Wikipedia, having already contributed to the site, the vast
majority do not even realize that the site can be edited by anyone
(Menchen–Trevino and Hargittai, 2011). Despite having been often advised
by instructors not to rely on the site as a single source for their
research assignments, most students use it to a significant extent; or
worse, will use obsolete, ad–ridden clones (forks) of it (Head and
Eisenberg, 2010; Menchen–Trevino and Hargittai, 2011). Fortunately,
students do show a growing awareness that Wikipedia is not totally
reliable, think about credibility of their sources, and use it as a
starting point for more advanced research (Head and Eisenberg, 2010; Lim
and Simon, 2011).

Why teach with Wikipedia?

There is a growing recognition that it is the task for educators to
teach the students how to responsibly engage with Wikipedia. As Lim
(2009) notes: “educators and librarians need to provide better
guidelines for using Wikipedia, rather than prohibiting Wikipedia use
altogether”. He is echoed by Knight and Pryke (2012): “a significant
proportion of what we would see as enlightened academics [...] realise
that it is pointless to try to hold back the online tide of Wikipedia.
Instead, they try to give guidance in the way that students consult it:
for clarification, references, comparison and definitions.”

The first stage in adopting Wikipedia for a course is the realization
that it can be used as an educational tool, with benefits for students,
educator and the larger community. In contrast to traditional writing
assignments, working with Wikipedia has several advantages for the
students:

students are held accountable to a global audience for what
they are doing, at the same time realizing that their work is not being
wasted, but is useful to the entire world, a fact they appreciate and
that increases their enjoyment of the course. Increased student
motivation in assignments that they see have a visible impact on the
real world has been noted before (Jones, 1998), and is confirmed both by
my experiences and other reports on the use of Wikipedia in the
classroom (McNeil, 2008; Brundage, 2008; Hill, 2011; Chen and Reber,
2011; Reilly, 2011). Reilly (2011) makes a very pertinent observation,
noting that while students could contribute to smaller, classroom–only
wikis, editing Wikipedia provides a much less artificial and much more
rewarding option. This approach also fits within the paradigm of the
service learning — a subtype of structured community work that has
academic attainment as primary goal (Weigert, 1998; Hollis, 2002; Forte
and Bruckman, 2006; Konieczny, 2007);

most Wikipedia editors contribute to the site because they find
contributing “fun” (Nov, 2007). While we cannot expect all students to
share that opinion (just like we cannot expect all Internet users to
contribute to Wikipedia), there are precious few other educational
assignments that are carried out by volunteers who think what they are
doing is “fun”. As such, the Wikipedia assignment, through its novelty
and real–world usefulness, has a potential to be more enjoyable than
most other traditional assignments, and some studies of student
motivations report high student assessments, particularly in the
graduate setting (Callis, et al., 2009; Banaji, 2010; Chen and Reber, 2011; Wright, 2012);

students learn the difference between essay–like and fact–based,
analytical, encyclopedic writing style. Encyclopedic style, similar to
that of term papers, thesis, dissertations and real–world research
reports, is useful in developing critical thinking and improving the
comprehension of course materials (Grauerholz, 1999; Schulenburg, et al., 2011);

as they have to review existing sources and search for new ones
beyond Wikipedia, students strengthen their ability to search for
reliable sources and evaluate them critically (Patch, 2010);

students gain insights into the creation process of texts on
Wikipedia and the reliability of articles on it. This enables them to
draw conclusions for which purposes Wikipedia can be used (and for which
it should not be). Reilly (2011) notes that only by realizing that
“anybody can edit Wikipedia”, reinforced through their own editing.
students will be able to more critically analyze the text on the Web
site in their future activities;

students, interacting with other group members but also the
worldwide Wikipedia community, learn how to work in a real–time,
real–world collaborative community–of–practice environment; an
experience that teaches them the value of objectivity and the
collaborative process of negotiating over the content (Bruns and
Humphrey, 2005; Schulenburg, et al., 2011). Reilly (2011)
stresses the discourse aspect that occurs on Wikipedia (between students
and Wikipedia volunteers) as one of the more important pedagogical
aspects of Wikipedia;

For most students, this is the first time they are asked to work
on a collaborative assignment using software that was developed for that
very purpose (the wiki). Thus students improve their new media literacy
and gain insights in the creation process of texts on wikis in general,
an increasingly essential skill in a modern IT workplace (Tapscott and
Williams, 2010; Schulenburg, et al., 2011).

How can assigning Wikipedia articles as coursework be beneficial for
an instructor? The educator gains various benefits from using Wikipedia
as a platform for education, in particular:

the instructor is assisted in the task of guiding/assessing
students by other editors from the Wikipedia community. Volunteers from
the Wikipedia Ambassador project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ambassadors)
can be seen as unofficial teaching assistants, more than willing to
offer help to any Wikipedia–using course. Further, their help is free
and requires very little if any bureaucratic paperwork;

the instructor is assisted in various secondary tasks, for
example Wikipedia volunteers employ dedicated tools making them very
efficient at quickly spotting plagiarism/copyright violations that might
pass unnoticed in the traditional assignments;

in the autumn of 2011, the Wikimedia Foundation begun developing
an “Education Program MediaWiki Extension”, giving instructors an extra
set of tools not needed by regular Wikipedia editors. Those tools should
include course and student management tools, logging of all special
education events, such as enrollment and courses association, and other
functionalities. As of Spring 2012, the tool [1] has entered beta testing;

wikis were developed with the goal of group collaboration
facilitation. Thus unsurprisingly, reviewing group participation and
individual activity is very easy with the wiki “history of
contributions” and “user contributions” functions. This makes Wikipedia
(and wikis in general) an excellent tool for monitoring the individual
activity in group assignments;

all of the content developed by the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF)
and
Wikipedia volunteers, and most of the content developed by other
instructors using Wikipedia is available under free licenses, as part of
the Open Educational Resources (http://www.oercommons.org/). It means that it can be reused for free and without even having to secure permission.

Finally, assigning Wikipedia articles as coursework is beneficial for the Wikipedia community, as:

more content is created, enhancing the site’s usefulness;

the content created is often in a more specialized, academic topics
that attract little attention from regular Wikipedia volunteers;

the content created is reviewed by experts (course instructors); and,

more people gain skills in editing Wikipedia and can become potential long–term contributors.

Lastly, the benefits even go beyond the Wikipedia and classroom
communities, as Wikipedia content is freely available to the entire
world and widely used. As such, students work translates into aiding all
those who use Wikipedia — which, as recent studies indicates, means
most Internet users (Zickuhr and Rainie, 2011).

However, while the consensus that Wikipedia can be a useful
educational tool is emerging, there are preciously few guidelines or
tutorials on how, exactly, Wikipedia should be used in teaching, nor
reviews on how it has been used for that purpose. The rest of this paper
addresses this gap.

How to build a good Wikipedia assignment and tailor it for your course

Adapting a course to incorporate Wikipedia assignments is not an
overly complex procedure; the course is not required to meet in a
computer lab and instructors can retain their favored readings, and so
on. What is likely to change is that a portion of course assignments
will require students to edit Wikipedia, and it is highly recommended
that a segment of at least one lecture or recitation involves
introducing student to that assignment and monitoring their progress
(Reilly, 2011). Presuming that the Wikipedia assignment would be taking
place of another assignment which would have occupied similar portions
of teaching time, teaching with Wikipedia can be easily adapted to
courses from any discipline without requiring massive changes to
underlying teaching material.

The process of adapting (or designing) a course to use Wikipedia is
greatly facilitated if the instructor is familiar with Wikipedia. An
instructor who does not have experience in editing Wikipedia will be
much less likely to efficiently and effectively teach with this tool. I
would go as far as to say that an instructor who teaches with Wikipedia
without knowing how to edit it is doing as good of a job as an
instructor who is teaching using a book that they have never read. An
instructor, unfamiliar with Wikipedia, will be unable to answer many
student queries and will be unable to offer useful advice. They will
likely find it difficult to use wiki tools such as customizing their
course wiki syllabi [2] or using the user contribution tool (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions)
to check on student activities on Wikipedia. Detached from the
Wikipedia community, and unfamiliar with places one can request
assistance, they will be unable to receive helpful input from editors,
such as feedback on plagiarism or warnings about impending deletion of
student work that fails to meet Wikipedia’s requirements.

This does not mean that an instructor has to dedicate countless hours
to become an experienced Wikipedia editor. Several hours — about as
much as it takes to read a book — can suffice to gain a basic
understanding. As a rule of thumb, being able to do all the things
required of students should be sufficient. If you want your students to
contribute a new article to Wikipedia, write one yourself first, and
make sure it meets community standards (a good way to learn if it does
is to submit it for a Wikipedia’s Did You Know (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Did_you_know) candidates review [3]).
If you want your students to learn which articles are reliable and
which are not, and how an article should be referenced, make sure to
read up Wikipedia’s policies on referencing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources),
and verify, review and reference an article or two yourself. If you
want your students to learn how to write good content for Wikipedia, try
writing a good article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good_article_criteria) by yourself. It is also highly recommended that you know how to use Wikipedia’s discussion (talk) pages [4], which are the primary means for editors to communicate.

Learning the basics of Wikipedia is not a time–consuming process; it
is a breeze compared to learning the basics of a statistical or
qualitative analysis package. A few hours of practice should be
sufficient to write an article, and if anybody has doubts about it,
please consider the fact that students in “teaching with Wikipedia
courses” consistently acquire the needed skills to do just that in such a
timeframe. This will not only net one the skills needed for teaching,
but will also allow one to contribute to the project oneself, heeding
the call of those who argue that contributing to Wikipedia should be
seen as academic responsibility. (Callis, et al., 2009; Corbyn,
2011; Wright, 2011, 2012). It can be simply “fun”, a word we do not
usually associate with either an educational activity nor with learning
new software (Nov, 2007).

Wikipedia’s alternatives

One of the first and most important questions facing an instructor
considering the use of Wikipedia in teaching is simply: “Is Wikipedia a
good place for my project?”

As noted earlier, Wikipedia can greatly enrich a course, and provide a
set of useful assignments. It cannot, however, replace all assignments —
contributing to an online encyclopedia offers many educational
opportunities, but is, in the end, limited primarily to adding or
enhancing encyclopedic content. Though there are interesting and
innovative ways that this can be utilized (students can review content,
discuss reliability of sources used, search for, verify and add
references, create encyclopedic graphs or videos, translate articles,
and so on), there are also several key limitations. Most notably
contributions to Wikipedia cannot contain original research, and have to
be encyclopedic in style (no essays allowed). Wikipedia is no sandbox —
it is a major public space on the Internet, and students will be
interacting with a “real world” online community.

On that note, there are several other projects related to Wikipedia
(all operated by the same, non–profit Wikimedia Foundation) that may be
of use to some courses, where Wikipedia is less than optimal:

Wikibooks (http://www.wikibooks.org/)
— a project geared towards collaborative book writing. It allows
non–encyclopedic style, original research, and focuses on creating
books. The project has been used for several educational assignments in
which students were contributing to creating a freely licensed textbook
related to their course subject [6].

Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page)
— a project that serves as a repository of freely licensed digital
media. Students can participate by contributing new media, but also by
improving the existing ones. This could involve media restoration,
digital image improvement, or simply identification of unidentified or
poorly categorized media, and improvement and/or translation of media
descriptions [8].

Wikiversity (http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity:Main_Page)
— a project with a very open format, geared towards supporting
educational projects in general. A good place of any educational project
that does not fit encyclopedic, journalistic or book formats [9].

How important should the Wikipedia assignment be for your project?

Once you have decided that Wikipedia is, indeed, the right venue for
your teaching assignment, we should consider the assignment’s importance
for a given course. What percentage of a grade will it consist of? If
it is a course you have taught before, what traditional assignments will
it replace? What is the goal of this teaching assignment?

Writing or creating articles on Wikipedia lends itself most easily as
a replacement for a final paper. Academic writing style is relatively
close to encyclopedic writing. A key difference to note is that
Wikipedia does not permit essays or original research. Students should
be asked to present their new founded knowledge, but not their own
opinions or findings. In other words, Wikipedia is a great place for
students to describe a theory, animal, book, or other well–established
concept that they have learned about in a course. They should however
not present their opinions of them, or results of their own surveys,
interviews or such.

Although most teaching with Wikipedia activities seem to be centered
at the undergraduate level, this approach has significant potential for
graduate studies as well. Graduate classes can offer much more enriching
discussions on the nature of knowledge creation, Wikipedia’s biases and
similar issues. Students can also also adapt their experiences as a
presentation piece or a peer–reviewed paper. For example, students in a
graduate seminar on plant–animal interactions presented their
experiences in a paper published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution (Callis, et al., 2009).

What will the students do?

Next, we need to consider what it is it that the students will do. As
Reilly (2011) notes, “the greatest hurdle students often need to
overcome in order to contribute to Wikipedia relates to topic
selection”.

It is most common to have students work on improving encyclopedic
content related to the course. For example, students in an introduction
to sociology course would work on improving selected sociology–related
articles. There are, however, other possibilities [10].
The assignment could examine article writing skills with a focus not on
the topic of an article but rather on language and grammar; such
approach could be favored by a course that teaches writing skills. A
class on research methods could concentrate on determining whether
articles are reliably referenced, adding references, improving them
(replacing unreliable ones), verifying them, and posting reviews on talk
pages. Several courses from various fields have focused on the process
of creating and negotiating Wikipedia articles themselves, to
demonstrate “the contested nature of knowledge production” and similar
concepts. In such courses, students could compare textbook information
with Wikipedia to see what’s missing from Wikipedia as well as in their
textbooks. A similar line of inquiry could analyze what Wikipedia
chooses not to include, and what kinds of articles are deleted, and why.
Finally, with the growing popularity of the site, it is likely we will
be increasingly seeing courses about Wikipedia itself, or at least
including segments dedicated to the understanding the site.

Assuming that you want your students to work on a specific set of
articles, you may either create a closed list of subjects that the
students can select or ask the students to find a subject relevant to
the course and not covered in Wikipedia that you’ll review and approve. I
usually do both — give them a list, but I also allow them to propose
their own suggestions. In either case, Wikipedia has a set of helpful
tools that assist you in creating such a list (or to which you can point
your students).

Articles on Wikipedia are in various stages of development. It is
usually easiest to have students start writing on a subject that is not
covered on Wikipedia, or develop one of the poorly written articles
(those are known on Wikipedia as stub or start classes [11]).
You can look at lists of poor quality or missing articles related to
your discipline. While a simple search through Google or Wikipedia’s own
search will eventually allow one to create such a list, there are a
number of tools developed by Wikipedian editors that can be easily
adapted towards generation of such a list:

for existing poor quality articles, as recommended by Schulenburg, et al. (2011), see if there is a Wikiproject (master list is at Wikipedia:WikiProject at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject) related to your field (for example, as I am a sociologist, I would go to Wikipedia:WikiProject_Sociology at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Sociology). Then look for the assessment table (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Sociology_articles_by_quality_statistics; it will be a colorful table with a heading similar to “Sociology articles by quality and importance” — see Image 1).
The articles assessed as stub and start are usually good enough for a
class project to develop. Note that while Wikipedia has many articles
(at the time I am writing this article, over three and a half million),
many of them are poor quality stub and start articles; for example
Sociology Wikiproject has assessed about 3,200 articles, and out of
those, 1,600 are stub and start classes, so chances are high you’ll find
more then enough articles to quickly create a list suitable for your
course.

Image 1: Sample WikiProject (in this case,
WikiProject Sociology) table listing articles by quality. The circle
highlights the links to two groups (Stub and Start) which contain poorly
developed articles ripe for students to develop.

If you cannot find a stub category related to your field, try
finding the relevant category (categories are always listed at the
bottom of each article). Usually the best way is to go to the primary
article about your field and look how it is categorized on Wikipedia.
For example, I’d go to the “Sociology” article and thus find
Category:Sociology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Sociology). Then, use the CatScan (http://toolserver.org/~daniel/WikiSense/CategoryIntersect.php) tool [12]
to search through your category for stub class articles in that
category. This tool is simple to use: just add the name of your field
category to the “search in category” field, check the “For stubs” field,
and click Scan. Keep in mind that this tool is slow, and it make take
several minutes for the page with results to be generated. See Image 2 for details.

For articles that need to be created, see Wikipedia’s Requested articles (Wikipedia:Requested_articles [13]) and find a section related to your class subject, or look at Outlines of knowledge categories (Category:Outlines at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Outlines) and try finding an article that covers the class subject. However, those lists are not comprehensive.

Before you approve a students project for a new article, a common
problem that arises is that the subject may be covered on Wikipedia
under a different name. I find that, on average, every fourth topic that
a student group asks me for permission to work on already has a
Wikipedia article, but under an alternative name the students had not
checked. To ensure that your students are not creating a page that will
be merged into an existing one, search on Wikipedia for synonyms, and
review related articles to see if they do not link to a proposed topic
under a different name.

Student activities

Consider, next: will you ask your students to improve existing
articles or create new ones? Or perhaps you would like them to improve
non–article content, for example by creating images such as graphs or
maps? You may also want your students to focus on reviewing existing
content, leaving suggestions for improvement of existing articles rather
then editing them directly [14].

Note that those choices are not exclusive — you can have different
wiki assignments in the course. In case you decide on a larger
assignment, such as writing an article (replacing a written paper
assignment) do note that it is important to have students learn wiki
editing skills before the last few days of the course; hence smaller
graded wiki assignments or deadlines throughout the course are highly
recommended. Those smaller assignments should have two goals: teaching
students wiki literacy skills, as well as more general skills, such as
proper referencing, checking for reliability in sources, and so on.

Wikipedia allows anonymous editing, which can be a problem, as some
students will forget to log in before making their edits. Make sure that
the students have created an account and make edits logged in, so you
can confirm that specific individuals are carrying out their
assignments.

On that note: both you and your students should have individual
Wikipedia accounts. Group accounts are against Wikipedia “one person,
one account” policy, and they nullify the ability to track what specific
students are doing.

Some simple initial exercises include:

First (test) edits:

Doing the Wikipedia:Tutorial (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tutorial)
which introduces students to the basics of Wikipedia editing. You may
also require the students to make an edit to the Tutorial Sandbox, with
which you can verify they completed this activity.

Making a discussion post on an article’s talk page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Talk_pages),
for example reviewing an article of their choice and suggesting ways to
improve it. This approach has also been recommended by Wadewitz, et al.
(2010). Make sure the students follow Wikipedia’s “netiquette” by
bottom–posting and signing it. That is covered by the tutorial, but it
wouldn’t hurt to demonstrate how commenting on the talk pages works in
class. You may also direct the students to Wikipedia:Peer Review (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Peer_Review)
where editors specifically list articles they’d like to receive
feedback on (this creates a higher chance of student–editor
interaction). Reviewing suspected hoax articles
(Category:Wikipedia_suspected_hoax_articles at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_suspected_hoax_articles) can provide some interesting insights into Wikipedia, too.

Interacting with a community. This is a good opportunity to show
students that Wikipedia is more than just a static reference Web site.
At Wikipedia:Reference Desk (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk),
students can ask a question, provide answers to another one, and
participate in discussions. This is a great way to quickly get them
familiar with the habit (and usefulness) of using wiki discussion
spaces.

Image 3: Sample discussion page from one of
several archives of past discussion in the article on Karl Marx. Note
the table of contents at the top, and the proper discussion following
it, with headings, indentations, signatures, and bottom–posting flow.

Article edits:

Students can edit an existing article. There are many
articles for students to chose from
Category:Wikipedia_cleanup_categories (http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_cleanup_categories);
at this stage it may be prudent to focus not on referencing, which is
slightly more complex than most other tasks on Wikipedia, but on more
simple edits.

More ambitious activity is related to merging of
articles, which may involve students reviewing two articles to determine
whether merger is needed, and then merging them if they determine it
is indeed advisable. Those articles are in the “Articles to be merged” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_to_be_merged) category.

Once the students have mastered basic editing, they can learn how to
reference articles. As Reilly (2011) notes, teaching with Wikipedia is a
good way to “reinforce a favorite mantra of faculty, namely the
importance of citing secondary sources”. Articles in need of references
(or reference review and verification) can be found in the “Wikipedia
articles with sourcing issues” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_articles_with_sourcing_issues) category. Further details can be found later in this paper in “Advanced editing #1: Referencing”.

Reilly (2011) also suggests an activity in which in the second half
of a class students look at their earlier edits, see if they were
retained by the community and write a report. This can be enhanced with
students attempting to communicate with editors who might have disagreed
with their edits, seek an understanding of their reasons, and try to
improve those earlier edits, and arrive at a better, consensus–driven
version. Such an activity combines article and discussion page edits
with significant community interaction and policy understanding.

You will likely select few of the above that appeal to you the most. Consider this example from the Union University Fall 2009 class:

“The students have
three categories of edits to work on. 1) Existing Wikipedia statements
with citations — check the statement against its cited source for
accuracy; if accurate, leave it alone; if not, change it. 2) Existing
Wikipedia statements without citations — find corroborating evidence for
these statements in your sources, and add citations. 3) New statements —
find facts in your sources that are not yet included in the article,
and add them, along with proper citations. The students are to make at
least 50 discrete edits, divided roughly evenly among these three
categories.”

Technicalities

Technicalities 1. Number of articles and students

Another question to consider is: how many articles will you want the students to work on? Several approaches have been used:

Group projects. The class focus is on improving several
articles; the students usually work in groups, each group works on a
different article. This is the most common approach.

One class project. The entire class focuses on improving one
article; the students may work individually or in groups, assigned to
different sections of an article.

One student — one article. The class focus is on hundreds of
articles; each students works on his or her own article. This is an
approach for some introductory courses, with relatively low focus on
Wikipedia.

Several interesting approaches have been pioneered for classes where
language is an issue (primarily, for language classes, and for classes
where students have two or more different native languages). For
students writing in non–native languages, a buddy system with teams of
two can be used, where one student specializes in translation, and
another, in content creation. It has also been suggested that students
learning English could contribute to the “Simple English Wikipedia” (http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page)
(Waters, 2011). Students proficient with more than one language can
compare different language Wikipedias and translate articles between
them.

A crucial item to consider is whether the students will work
individually, in teams or in larger groups. While wikis were designed to
be collaborative tools, and as such they lend themselves to larger
group projects, some early “learn how to use a wiki” assignments are
best suited for individual assignments.

A final technicality to consider is “where will the students work”
with regards to the virtual location of their work on Wikipedia.
Basically, the students have two options. They can work in Wikipedia’s
main article space (where the regular Wikipedia encyclopedic articles
are) or in a draft space (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Workpages).
The draft space refers to a temporary, semi–private page that can be
created by any editor in their user space or in project space (so
instead of “en.wikipedia.org/Article your students would be working on”,
it would be at “en.wikipedia.org/User:X/Draft article”). Then, once the
article is ready, they can move it to the mainspace. The advantages and
disadvantages of working in a draft space are similar — the articles
will not not be seen by any regular users, and neither will they come to
the attention of most regular Wikipedians. It means it will not risk
being listed for deletion if the students first attempt is a mess, but
it also means that the students interaction with the community will be
vastly limited.

In my experience, if the students receive proper guidance prior to
creating their first article (primarily by having some experience doing
smaller edits, and by being told in the assignment what is expected of
their first article), the deletion is a very unlikely occurrence. I
agree with instructors who voiced the following sentiment: “students
should start immediately editing in main space (rather than first
working on their articles in user–space, or off–site). This will allow
them to absorb Wikipedia conventions from day one, and to profit from
the guidance of other editors” (Wikipedia, 2008). Similar sentiments
where echoed by Wadewitz, et al. (2010).

When will the students work on Wikipedia? The importance of deadlines

Learning how to edit a wiki takes a little time. Designing a course
with that in mind is important, so that students will have the
opportunity to acquire the necessary skills before embarking on a larger
assignment. If students will not be required to learn how to edit early
on, many will likely not do it until the very deadline, when they
realize that editing a wiki is a skill that takes more than five minutes
to learn, leading to frustration and poor quality work.

Here is a simplified timetable [15] from one of my past course that is designed to start with warm–up exercises leading to a major group project:

September 14: introduction to assignments, group assignment

September 21: deadline for individual completing Wikipedia Tutorial, first edits

October 5: deadline for selecting articles for the groups

October 14: deadline for individual posting of outlines/“to do” lists on group article’s talk pages

November 2: deadline for having an early draft of the group article for reviews by other groups/instructors

November 16: deadline for finishing the group article and its submission to a Good Article review process

December 11: articles are graded (students are expected to monitor and address instructor and GA reviewer’s comments till then)

Creating a wiki syllabus is easy

It is helpful to have an online page describing the wiki assignment.
While you can put such a page anywhere on the Internet, note that
Wikipedia will gladly host it as well. You can list your course at the
Wikipedia’s School and Universities Page, and on a subpage add
information about institution and faculty, target articles, aims,
duration, instructions for students and whatever else you find useful.
Hosting your course page on Wikipedia has several advantages: it is
free; editing it will improve your wiki editing skills; it is much
easier to update than most static pages; it is transparent to the
Wikipedia community; and finally it will use Wikipedia style and thus
limit the number of Web pages and styles your students have to deal
with.

To facilitate creation of such a page, I have developed the
“wikisyllabus”, which contains sections on the timetable, grading,
instructions and tips for students and a student list. It also contains a
series of assignments, designed to teach student how to edit Wikipedia,
starting with a series of “warm up” exercises and leading to a major
group project in which students create or improve a Wikipedia article
with the ultimate goal of achieving the “Good Article” community–awarded
status. The wikisyllabus is designed in the form of a template that can
be easily copied and adapted to a course in most fields [16].

Second tip: Students love to procrastinate. Design the course to
fight that tendency. Regular graded wiki activities and graded deadlines
on larger projects will keep them from putting everything off till the
last few days.

The two most effective procedures to incorporate into a course are the Did You Know and Good Article reviews.

Did You Know requires that an article is relatively recent (created
no more than a week before the nomination) or expanded (within the same
time frame) five–fold. Such an article should be also larger than a stub
(roughly, containing at least 1,500 characters of prose), properly
formatted and with inline references at least for key claims. Such an
article should be listed at the Did You Know nominations page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Did_you_know),
and will be reviewed by another editor. As some reviewers just leave
their comments at that page, students should monitor it daily, till the
review is passed, to address any issues raised. Upon the successful
review, the article will be eligible for an appearance on Wikipedia’s
front page in the “Did you know...” section (the article will usually be
featured for several hours, few days after a successful review is
concluded). One of the handouts at the Wikipedia Ambassador’s Resources
page listed above provides a detailed outline for a “Did You Know”
assignment [17].

Image 5: Did You Know articles students write
will be featured in the (highlighted) section of Wikipedia’s Main Page
for several hours, usually attracting several thousand readers.

A more challenging process is the Good Article reviews. Compared to
Did You Knows, Good Articles are usually much longer, required to be a
relatively comprehensive treatments of a given subject, and are subject
to a much more detailed review of prose, comprehensive and reliable
sourcing. Good Article reviewers will provide a much more detailed
review, and will expect a much higher level of interaction than the Did
You Know reviewers. The procedure of nominating an article for a Good
Article is relatively simple and covered on the Good Article Nomination
page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good_article_nominations).

In my experience, about half of the student groups in my courses are
able to achieve a Good Article status on their articles, and the
remaining half end up with the “almost Good Article“ B–class status.
Numerous other students or groups have achieved a Did You Know status,
particularly with the help of the Campus and Online Ambassadors [18].

Note that Good Articles often have a backlog of several weeks from
nomination to review. This makes them problematic for assignment with
tighter deadlines, but this can be easily rectified. On the talk page of
the Good Article Nominations page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Good_article_nominations)
one can ask for reviewers who would be willing to review your student
articles ahead of schedule (due to class deadlines). In all cases I have
asked for reviewers, volunteers agreed to review my class articles
within few days (and kept good on that promise). It is not required, but
in good form, for an instructor and his assistants to agree to review
some other Good Articles nominees, to reduce the workload that the
educational assignments put on Good Article reviewers.

You will also surely want to review the students articles yourself. Wikipedia offers a useful tool — the Peer Reviewer (http://toolserver.org/~dispenser/view/Peer_reviewer) [19] — that will check for technical errors within the article (such as Wikipedia Manual of Style issues).

Fourth tip: Encourage the use of discussion (talk) pages. As Reilly
(2011) notes, those interactions can be one of the most constructive and
motivating elements of the Wikipedia assignment. All of Wikipedia’s
articles have discussion pages accessible through a tab in the top right
corner of the article, labeled “discussion”. Those pages serve as
primary communication venue on Wikipedia. When students edit an article,
they should monitor its discussion page for comments from other
editors. Also, each editor has their own public discussion (talk) page.

Image 6: Top of a Wikipedia article, read mode. Note the talk tab to the left, and edit and view history tabls to the right.

Wikipedia netiquette has evolved in such a way that it is expected
that editors will conduct most of their public discussion through
discussion (talk) pages, rather then through e–mail. If students ignore
those pages, they will likely fail to spot or respond to inquires,
suggestions and reviews from other, more seasoned Wikipedia editors.
This is problematic, as proper use of discussion pages can be very
beneficial. One of the educators remarked on this issue: “[Through
discussion pages, students] also got to experience feedback in many
forms from someone other than me. I think that may have been the
greatest challenge and lesson they learned — not everyone will bend over
backwards to spare their feelings, and they are unable to control what
everyone says about their work. I also required that they take ALL
feedback, good and bad, into account. This was tough for many, but it
made them better writers.” (Brundage, 2008)

This form of communication is however likely to be new to students,
and getting used to it is perhaps one of the biggest challenges. To
ensure that the students utilize the those pages, I employ four
solutions in my courses:

second, some early warm–up activities should require students to use
those pages (post review of an article, ask questions at the Reference
Desk, post an outline and “to do” lists of their future work, and so
on);

third, the students (and you) can subscribe to RSS (e–mail) alerts
when the page they are interested in (their own discussion pages and the
assignment page, most likely) has been edited. This can be achieved
through RSS
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Syndication);

fourth, as of early 2011, Wikipedia has also introduced an option to
receive e–mail notifications whenever one’s talkpage is changed (to be
enabled in your preferences).

It is highly recommended to monitor all student talk page activity,
and interact with them on Wikipedia by posting
comments/suggestions/reviews, answering their questions and asking your
own questions about their progress.

Some potential problems with discussion pages include:

students may not realize they need to bottompost (new
comments, on Wikipedia, always go at the bottom of a page/under the last
relevant comment) and sign their posts;

students often tend to use discussion page to “declare” things,
rather then interact with others. Stress that discussion pages are for
discussion, not just announcements;

also, give a “heads up” on article’s discussion page, warning
editors monitoring it about the influx of newbies. This is likely to
assure their goodwill ahead of time. To do so, see which editors have
commented on a given article’s discussion page before, and contact them
through their user discussion pages, notifying them that the article
they may be interested in will be a subject of an educational assignment
they may want to help out with;

rarely, a misguided editor will be uncivil to students and/or an
instructor, telling them that Wikipedia is not a place for educational
assignments, and/or that this project is damaging the article/discussion
page. Reminding them that educational assignments are an established
part of Wikipedia and that Wikipedia has a “do not bite the newcomers”
policy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Please_do_not_bite_the_newcomers)
should usually suffice. In either case, students encountering
unfriendly editors are reported to be a very rare occurrence, consistent
with my own experiences (Ehmann, et al., 2009; Reilly, 2011);

some discussion pages, particularly those of articles just
created by students, will not be monitored by other editors. Thus
student posts on them may not elicit any reply, potentially damaging
student motivations. You may want to solicit comments, either through
posting on relevant discussion pages, or inviting comments through the
previously mentioned Wikipedia–wide “request for comment” discussions.

Fifth tip: Think about student motivations. Explain to them that by
doing assignments on Wikipedia they are learning valuable twenty–first
century computer literacy skills, something to include on their resumes.
Further, it is worth stressing that they are learning about the
reliability of the most popular source of information in the online
world, and their work will become a digital artifact, helping others and
that they can point to now and in the years to come.

When participating in the Did You Know, or Feature Article process,
the students’ handiwork can appear on Wikipedia’s main page, read by
tens of thousands of visitors around the world that day. One of the
students who participated in such assignment commented on their finished
product: “Because I have worked so hard writing and re–writing it, I am
extremely proud of the finished result. I almost can’t believe I helped
write it when I look back over it. Term papers I have handed back end
up in a binder than eventually sits under my bed and files sit on my
computer unopened ever again. This wikipedia page will be seen and
likely used by others in the future. After all, I am quite confident
that the references list is a comprehensive list of nearly everything
published in English on the subject. Any student or person looking to
read more about El Señor Presidente no longer has to look any further
than our references list. Now that is something truly amazing!” (McNeil,
2008)

Sixth tip: Check the preferences page for many useful settings.
Receiving e–mail is disabled by default. If you do not have the habit of
checking your talk page daily, enable e–mail, and you may advise
students to do the same.

Seventh tip: As Reilly (2011) notes, it is a good idea to encourage
student use of the edit summary tool while editing. When making edits,
all editors are advised to add helpful summaries of what they have done,
visible from the history and contribution tabs. This helps the
instructor, but also the students, as it may force the student to spend
more time rethinking and improving their edits, increasing chances their
edits will be positively received by others.

Eighth tip: Remember about copyright. In addition to thinking about
plagiarism, think about copyright in general. Check who owns your
students’ course work. If the owner is your institution, check that you
have permission to submit it. If it is your students’ (as is most
common), ensure that you have their consent to require them to add
material to Wikipedia (a note in the syllabus should be sufficient).

Ninth tip: Consider this advice from Cory Doctorow (2007): “The
assignment went very well ... The key is to put every student’s edits up
for the whole class to see and discuss at each lecture.” Whether you
will want to dedicate lecture time to reviewing a given Wikipedia
assignment is, of course, a significant issue to consider. Many
successful courses have used Wikipedia without putting that much stress
on this assignment, however Doctorow’s insight is certainly worth
considering.

Tenth tip: Wikis make monitoring student activities easy. Make sure
you are familiar with page history and editor contribution tools.
Article’s history (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Page_history),
accessible through “history” tab at the top of each article, will allow
you to see who has edited a given article, when and how. The editor
contribution tool (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:User_contributions),
accessible through an article’s history or user pages, allows you to
see exactly what and when a given student has been doing [20].

Image 7: User contributions for a student, showing exactly when the student has been active, and on which article.

Image 8: An in–depth view of a specific student contribution, showing exactly what the student has changed in an article.

Advanced editing 1. Referencing

Referencing Wikipedia article is likely among the most useful tasks
students can do, outside writing them (which involves referencing in any
case). Acquiring referencing skills opens a very useful field for
student activities: adding and verifying references. There is a plethora
of articles to be fixed (see the “Wikipedia articles with sourcing
issues” category). Those skills are great for teaching students about
reliability of sources in general and the reliability of Wikipedia and
its limits in particular.

Until early 2011, referencing involved learning a little bit of code,
making it rather more complex than most other edits. Recently, however,
interface improvements made referencing a much more friendly task. In
the editing mode, the editing toolbar (a line over the editing windows
with buttons for bolding text, inserting links and such) now also has a
“cite” button which generates pop–up windows allowing editors to enter
bibliographical data for book, journals, Web articles or other types of
data.

Image 9: The Journal citation pop up, that once
filled will the generate the appropriate wiki code, and place it in the
article when needed. It is accessed from the cite menu (highlighted),
and selected from the pull–down “templates” menu (to the left of the
highlight).

Note that after entering information in this pop–up box, it will
generate and insert less friendly code into an article’s editing window.
There is no need for an editor to do anything to the code, however, it
will be visible. Some students may be confused by this code, and thus
demonstrating how referencing works on Wikipedia, and a brief
explanation and demystification of the <ref></ref> and
<ref name=></ref> code in class is beneficial [21].
I would strongly suggest combining this with a short lecture segment on
what a reliable source is (why books are better than blogs, avoiding
“random Web sites”, avoiding course presentation slides, and such).
Students often do not realize what makes a source reliable or not, and
learning this constitutes a valuable skill certainly applicable outside
Wikipedia.

Finally, it is important to note that Wikipedia’s referencing
standards are usually higher than those of a regular term paper. In
particular, students should reference most sentences — thus they will be
less likely to get away with plagiarism or using unreliable sources.

Advanced editing 2. Images

Adding an image to article can be tricky, but rewarding, particularly
if it is an image students have taken or created themselves.

When uploading an image to Wikipedia, one needs to keep in mind that
the image has to be available under a free license or exist in public
domain. Many students are unfamiliar with copyright issues, and they
need to learn that a “random image found on the Web” is not acceptable
on Wikipedia (or in most other places). This is a great learning
opportunity to teach students about the increasingly important issues of
free culture and copyright (Lessig, 2004).

When the students are ready to upload an image, they should do it through the Upload Wizard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:File_Upload_Wizard).
The image will be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, a repository of free
media for Wikipedia and its sister projects; the Wizard will provide a
code that needs to be added to the article so that the image will
appear.

While the Upload Wizard prompts editors to select a free license and
describe the source of the image, in my experience, students often
ignore that requirement, leading to their images being deleted as
copyright violations. If your students will be uploading images or other
media, make sure to stress the importance of free licensing (and a
demonstration of how to upload an image may be helpful).

Advanced editing 3. Tables and infoboxes

Tables and infoboxes (specialized tables found at the beginning of
many Wikipedia articles) are unfortunately rather code–heavy. Therefore I
do not require my students to use any of them. Nonetheless if you think
students in your class are relatively computer–savvy, or that tables
and/or infoboxes would add something significant to your assignments,
Help:Table (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Table) and Help:Infobox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Infobox) pages will be useful.

Even if you do not require students to use tables of infoboxes, at
the very least, just like with referencing, students should realize that
in the editing mode, when editing an article with tables or infoboxes,
they can encounter blocks of code [22].
To demystify them, when demonstrating the basics of Wikipedia, after
editing in a simple article without an infobox (such as “tradition”),
show students an article with an infobox (most biographical articles
will have them, for example, “Karl Marx”). Next, show them that they can
edit the text in the infobox, as well as underneath it, just like
anywhere else.

Image 10: An article’s infobox (right) is
usually code heavy (code pictured to the left). However, students can
just ignore it, or ask experienced Wikipedians for help.

Common problems with Wikipedia assignments

Over several years, I observed that common problems with teaching with Wikipedia can be classified into two categories:

an instructor not understanding Wikipedia (worst case: teachers
asking students to vandalize Wikipedia to demonstrate its unreliability
or similar concepts, or to create hoax articles) [23];

students not understanding Wikipedia (poor explanations from a given instructor).

Either way, this leads to deletion of articles due to either original research or plagiarism.

Having your students work disappear can be a serious blow to their
motivation. Two courses illustrate this, with as much as half of the
student–created content deleted within days of creation, due to being
plagiarized, unencyclopedic or merged upon identification of already
existing articles on the same subject [24].

The “no original research” policy means that articles on Wikipedia
need to be written in encyclopedic style, cite reliable, secondary
sources for all claims, and avoid essay–like personal opinions and
first–hand findings. In my experience, once the structure and purpose of
an encyclopedic article is explained to students, they find it rather
easy to grasp this idea.

The problem of plagiarism is much better known throughout academia.
In the past few years, I have found that close to a third of undergrads
have a plagiarism–related “misunderstanding”. Fortunately, I found a way
to reduce those misunderstandings to almost zero.

First, assume that the students do not really know much about
plagiarism, and what they may know is likely incomplete. Explain to them
what plagiarism and copyright violations are. In particular, they need
to realize that they should not only cite sources, but avoid long
quotations or attributed copy pastes I lost count how often students
copy and paste segments, attribute them, and think this is allowed.
Others copy and paste text, intending to rewrite it later. This is not
allowed on Wikipedia, where even early drafts are public and must be
free of plagiarism (know on Wikipedia as “copyvio”). You may want to
direct your students to helpful guides on Wikipedia:
Wikipedia:Copy–paste (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copy-paste), Wikipedia:Quotations#When_not_to_use_quotations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Quotations#When_not_to_use_quotations) and Wikipedia:Close_paraphrasing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Close_paraphrasing).

Second, after explaining to them what they should not do, it is time
to strike some fear into them. I recommend mentioning academic ethical
guidelines and penalties. Follow it up by showing students how easy it
is to find out whether they have committed plagiarism. I usually begin
by demonstrating for them how easy it is to check for plagiarism on
Google, noting that Google indexes books (through Gooble Books),
newspapers (through Google News) and journals (through Google Scholar).
Next, Wikipedia offers an even greater stick: a proof that all
plagiarized content will be caught, quickly and publicly. Show students
how vigilant Wikipedia is of copyright:
Wikipedia:Suspected_copyright_violations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Suspected_copyright_violations) and Wikipedia:Copyright_problems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright_problems)
are quite a sight — dozens, if not hundreds, of new plagiarized entries
on Wikipedia are found and dealt with within hours of posting. Indeed,
in my personal experience, Wikipedia volunteers have detected more than a
half of copyvio/plagiarism problems with articles of my students before
I did.

Lastly, here are some common questions my students keep asking me in
every course. It is a good idea to be able to answer them quickly:

how do I add references? (show them how to use the reference button in the toolbar);

how do I add image? (show them how to add an image to an article);

image I uploaded got deleted (likely because the student just found
an image ”somewhere“ on the Web and does not understand the concept of
Wikipedia accepting only freely licensed images);

content I added got deleted (it was either plagiarized, or
unencyclopedic, such as a ”to do“ list or empty sections that belong on
the talk page instead);

where can I find some reliable sources? (it is a good idea to have a
segment on finding reliable sources for any writing assignment).

What do students think about Wikipedia assignments?

Students are ambivalent about whether wikis are easy, but a lecture
segment on how to edit vastly improves their perception of how easy it
was to learn this tool. Augar, et al. (2005) found that 73
percent of their students considered wiki technology “easy to use”, and
after incorporating a “how to edit Wikipedia” segment into my initial
lectures (three one our segments in a computer lab), a similar portion
of my students expressed the same sentiment.

Students are ambivalent about wiki assignments: some love them, some
hate them, most are neutral; based on my observations, about half of
them prefer a wiki assignment to a traditional one. The students who
disliked the assignment usually noted that it was more difficult than
just writing a regular paper in a text editor would be. Those who liked
it commented that their project resulted in an above–average group paper
that would be seen and appreciated by others. At the same time, Chen
and Reber (2011) reported that most students in their course appreciated
the Wikipedia assignment, as did Callis, et al. (2009) and
Wright (2012). I expect that the difference is due to my students being
undergraduate, compared to the primarily graduate (and thus, more
motivated) composition of the population of other studies.

Students did certainly appreciate that their work is seen and useful
to the wider public, and that they are creating useful digital
artifacts. This is consistent with previous findings in the literature,
as students are known to be more motivated to participate in activities
that they see as having a visible impact on the real world (Weigert,
1998; Hollis, 2002; Forte and Bruckman, 2006; McNeil, 2008; Brundage,
2008).

Students also show some appreciation for learning a new tool that
they may find useful in the future work, although they may well not
realize how likely it is that they will be using wikis in their future
careers (Tapscott and Williams, 2010). This should come as no surprise,
considering most of them did not know what a wiki is before the
beginning of a course (Menchen–Trevino and Hargittai, 2011).

Conclusions

A Wikipedia assignment allows one to easily incorporate into teaching
practice lessons on reliability, copyrights and free culture, as well
as wikis and Wikipedia, which form an increasingly useful skillets for
the new, digital literacies of this century. There are no costs involved
beyond acquiring some basic wiki editing skills that one can utilize in
heeding the call for academics to contribute to Wikipedia, and more
selfishly, in collaborative work on various research projects. Free help
from motivated Wikipedia volunteers (such as the Campus and Online
Ambassadors) is often more substantial than assistance promised from
for–profit groups. Finally, the assignment easily fits into most syllabi
by replacing the traditional (“write–grade–shred–forget”) writing
assignment with a contribution to a popular, public and non–profit
project in the best tradition of the “service learning” paradigm.

About the author

Piotr Konieczny received his Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology
at the University of Pittsburgh in August 2012. He is interested in the
sociology of the Internet, in particular in topics such as wikis — their
impact on individuals and organizations; decision–making processes and
organizational structure of Wikipedia; patterns of behavior among its
contributors; relation between wikis and social movements; and, teaching
with new media.

12. Available at http://toolserver.org/%7Edaniel/WikiSense/CategoryIntersect.php. Also, a revised, if more intimidating, version of the tool is at http://toolserver.org/~magnus/catscan_rewrite.php.
Using the CatScan tool you can create intersects between two
categories, for example you can easily get a list of which articles in
the “Sociology” category (or its subcategories) are also in the
“Wikipedia articles with sourcing issues” cleanup category. To do so,
you’d use the tool as described previously, but use the “for pages by
category” search option instead of “for stubs”. Note, also, that CatScan
will return only the first 1,000 entries (in alphabetical order). If
you find this is not enough (as you may well do — in my test run, for
the categories mentioned above, the 1,000 articles ended at D with the
“Demographics of New York City” article), you may want to limit the
category depth parameter (“with depth” parameter is checked as three by
default, reduce it two two or one is likely to help). In my case,
limiting both to two resulted in a more manageable list of 638 articles.

22.
Wikimedia Foundation has been working on a “WYSWIG” editor that would
eliminate the need for editors to deal with code for several years. In
Spring 2012, a beta version was announced and is available for testing
at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor.

Alison J. Head and Michael B. Eisenberg, 2010. “How today’s college students use Wikipedia for course–related research,” First Monday, volume 15, number 3, at http://firstmonday.org/article/view/2830/2476, accessed 24 June 2012.

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About Me

Nader Ale Ebrahim has
a Technology Management PhD degree from the Department of Engineering
Design and Manufacture, Faculty of Engineering, University of Malaya
(UM), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He holds a Master of Science in the
mechanical engineering from University of Tehran, Iran.